Timothy Birdnow

I had an e-mail discussion about the folly of shutting down the planetary economy to address the Wuhan Virus. I said:

We have actually worked AGAINST herd immunity by quarantine, social distancing, and the endless sanitizing. These things were originally sold to us as a way to "flatten the curve" meaning stretch the infection rates out so everyone didn't get sick at once and the hospitals could handle it. But now half of the hospitals are empty, even the wards set up for COVID 19. And this has subtly changed from "flatten the curve" to "save lives". But what we are doing won't save lives and was never intended for that purpose. We need herd immunity, which means the young and healthy and strong need to get it, develop immunity, and break the chain of infection. Now we are not just prolonging the inevitable but perhaps guaranteeing it will be worse because we are giving the virus every incentive to mutate. These are STUPID policies! And the deaths from the economic destruction we are witnessing will dwarf the deaths from the virus. One last point; adjusted for population growth this pandemic does not appear to be much worse than the H2N2 pandemic of 1957, or of the H2N2 pandemic of 1968 (in America anyway). We never came close to doing all of this. And it certainly is nowhere near the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. This isn't smallpox. We have to face it and quit hiding under our beds.


My interlocutor Deborah replied:

Timothy Birdnow herd immunity requires 80-90% infected. Why would we want to sacrifice thousands of lives to achieve that. Looks like 70% of deaths are 65 and older which still means 30% were under which do the math is still a lot of people . And looking at longevity averages a person at 60 would have been robbed of several years of life . We need to better understand why the young otherwise healthy people died and what the new cases of Kawasaki in children is surfacing. This is a complex virus that we still don’t know a lot about and several mutations exist in different parts of the country.


Deborah Edge, I appreciate your point but think your assumptions are wrong on this.

First, this disease appears to have a mortality rate much lower than previously believed, approaching the standard influenza. You seem to be assuming that everyone who gets this will die, like Ebola. In fact the percentage of the population

I also must question your 80-90% rate. Measles have a very high herd immunity rate at 92% but COVID 19 is likely far lower - as low as 50% according to Dr. Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.  So we are talking about half of the population getting sick with the illness. That seems like a lot but not if you consider that this will happen anyway - and that most of those who catch this will be asymptomatic or only mildly ill - this makes it a far less onerous thing. We MAY get a vaccine  but we may not either. Are you prepared to keep the world economy shut down for that long a stretch? Do you have any idea how many people will die, and the utter destruction an economic collapse will cause? The Great Depression gave us Hitler and WWII. The shutdown will wind up being worse if it continues much longer.

As of now we don't know what the RO factor is of this disease. It does in fact appear that a lot more people have had it than previously thought, so that number is dropping well lower than the numbers used in the models. And that would make estimates of the mortality rate wildly incorrect.

I would point out Sweden has opted for herd immunity and does not have a mortality rate higher than most of the rest of Europe. And their infection rates are leveling off, meaning they are reaching herd immunity.

I agree; we don't WANT to subject anyone to it, and certainly any death is a tragedy. I am in a high risk group myself, btw. I would probably die from it. But the point is we don't know if we will ever develop a vaccine and the longer this goes on the more likely it is to mutate, precisely as you suggest. I fear we are artificially inducing that mutation by putting pressure on it via all the sanitizing and the mask wearing and whatnot. There are now strong environmental pressures for this thing to evolve into a more lethal disease.

Bear in mind that most deaths from this disease have been in enclosed environments - cruise ships, nursing homes, etc. In New York the Governor ordered nursing homes to take in COVID patients - something guaranteed to cause this to burn through the sick, elderly population. It should also be pointed out there is a concerted effort to inflate the stats on this disease, to argue for a higher mortality rate. Certainly guidelines have come down to doctors and hospitals to list COVID as cause of death even without the presence of antibody tests. And Medicare has been paying more for a Covid diagnosis.

As Deborah Birx pointed out:

"There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and let's say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem -- some countries are recording that as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. Right now ... if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death."

Here https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/09/its-difficult-to-grasp-the-projected-deaths-from-covid-19-heres-how-they-compare-to-other-causes-of-death/ is a quick link I found that shows how this is in respect to some other recent diseases. The do put up the numbers from the Spanish flu. They do NOT include the pandemics of 1957 or 68, which would be much more comparable. And I can't see the methodology; was it adjusted for population growth? The two mid-century pandemics are VERY comparable to this one and we did not close up the whole country.

The U.N. is predicting hundreds of thousands of children will die worldwide from the economic downturn. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-children-un/u-n-warns-economic-downturn-could-kill-hundreds-of-thousands-of-children-in-2020-idUSKBN21Y2X7 It is probable that many more adults will die. And given that we now have a worse unemployment rate than during the Great Depression we can expect those numbers to rise.

In the end we definitely want a vaccine, but we may never get one. We cannot wait until one is developed. That is sheer madness.

BTW Unicef is now arguing that six thousand children will die a day due to the virus shutdown. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/may/13/unicef-6000-children-could-die-every-day-due-to-impact-of-coronavirus?fbclid=IwAR2bdV9XP2nx4QxCmdcEOXcoS12kMU153GLZo5iwOWztzUeWlN_KwEqed_0
That means in ten days we will have sixty thousand children die. In three months close to a hundred and eighty thousand. We cannot afford that.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:14 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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